smoke one cigarette
every three hours and, in essence, behave in about the same way as a
prisoner confined in solitary. The similarity did not bother Jerry
Markham, for this was honor, not punishment.

* * * * *

Huvane collected him with the ease of a fisherman landing a netted crab.
Easily, painlessly. Shockingly, for the crab doesn't exactly take to the
net with docility.

Huvane collected the whole shebang, man and machinery; then opened the
spacecraft with the same attitude as a man peeling the lid from a can of
sardines. He could have breached the air lock, but he wanted the Terran
to understand the power behind the act.

Jerry Markham came out blinking; very mildly wondering about the air. It
was good. Without considering the rather high probability that nobody
spoke the language, he blurted:

"What gives?"

He was not very much surprised when one of them in uniform said curtly,
"This way and make it snappy, Terran!"

No, he was not surprised. He was too stunned to permit anything as
simple as surprise. And through the shock and the stun, his months of
training came through. Jerry Markham worried his first worry: _How was
he going to get the word back home?_

Confinement in the metal cell of his top-stage hadn't bothered him. The
concept of landing on a planet that couldn't come closer to home than
some twenty-seven million miles was mere peanuts. Isolation for a year
was no more than a hiatus, a period of adventure that would be rewarded
many-fold. Sally? So she might not wait but there were others; he'd
envisioned himself fighting them off with a club after his successful
return. Hell, they'd swarmed him before his take-off, starting with the
moment his number had come up as possible candidate.

No, the meeting with competence in space did not shock him greatly. What
bothered him was his lack of control over the situation. Had he seen
them and passed on about his business, he recounted the incident.

As it was, his desire to tell somebody about it was cut off. As he sat,
alone and helpless, it occurred to him that he did not mind so much the
dying, if that was to be his lot. What mattered was the unmarked grave.
The mourning did not move him; the physical concept of "grave" and its
fill of moldering organic substances was nothing. It was mere symbol. So
long as people knew how and where, it made little difference to Jerry
Markham whether he was planted in a duridium c